About Jules Frazier

In her photographs of rodeo queens, Jules Frazier seeks to represent an unseen side of America and to document the continuing spirit of the Wild West. Frazier happened upon her subject matter during a 1985 trip to Sun Valley, Idaho, during which she spontaneously entered and won a Rodeo Queen competition. Working with vintage film cameras, Frazier began staging images with posed rodeo queens and props to best reveal their spirit and dedication. These traveling female representatives of the rodeo became the subject of her series “Faded Icons of the West.” Though her project was initially voyeuristic, she established herself as a rodeo ethnographer, finding inspiration in the work of such editorial photographers as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Imogen Cunningham.